But as long as one remains inthe dualistic state, one’s experience has alwaysunderlying it a sense of loss, of fear, of anxiety,and dissatisfaction.When, on the other hand, one goes beyond thedualistic level, anything is possible.

Francois Mauriac agrees:

Men resemble great deserted palaces: the owner occupies

only a few rooms and has closed-off wings

where he never ventures.

b) Most people are prey of their vital energies

which always crave strong sensations and unconsciously seek them also in conflict, despair and psychological suffering, making a mess or even a tragedy of their lives.

Clearly they manage to endure such miserable lives because

they are so unconscious,otherwise

it would be too intolerable.

Do you perchance think that if you were fully conscious you would tolerate, for example, any anger, sadness, etc in you?

Einstein pointed out that:

We see, feel, speak, but we do not know which energy makes us see,

feel and think. And what is worst is that

we care nothing about it.

In which measure do you care about it?

After leaving his father’s home the Bible’s “prodigal son” ended up looking after the pigs

The sentence “he was content to eat the food those pigs were eating” means that

our “natural” cravings for superficial things keep us

prisoner of a dream, of illusion,

while with our “Father”, the Divine, we can be nourished by joy,

ecstasy, love, vision and conscious immortality.

Mère adds that:

Whoever lives in the ordinary consciousness knows so little of what happens physically – very little. They believe that they do, but they know only a thin appearance, thick like a sheet of paper wrapping a box;

underneath it there is the whole box and what it contains, but the appearance

is all they see…it is the Grace that prevents people from knowing,

they would get one of those frights!

Why would they get such a fright?

c) We evolved from brute matter

and there is still in us an obscure, heavy force

like a gravity of the spirit limiting us to our physical body with its plethora of desires and our superficial mind with all its ignorant routines and moods, shallow reactions and deadening identifications.

The reason that so few ever try to find this Door, and of these not so many succeed in finding it, and even if those who do often fail to find in themselves the courage to go through it, is that while to become a doctor or an engineer, for example, we prepare ourselves studying for years,

we are thrown in the confused cauldron of life

without any preparation at all,

and under the heavy burden of countless conditionings, misconceptions, materialistic tendencies and wrong beliefs.

To which extent are you free from all this?

In the Mahabharata when Yudhisthira was asked which the greatest wonder in the world was he replied that

Every day we see others dying, yet those left alive go on with their lives

Everything in modern city life is calculated to keep man from entering

into himself and thinking about spiritual things.

Even with the best of intentions a spiritual man finds himself exhausted and deadened and debased by the constant noise of machines and loudspeakers, the dead air and the glaring lights of offices and shops, the everlasting suggestion of advertising and propaganda.

The whole mechanism of modern life is geared for a flight from God

and from the spirit into the wilderness of neurosis.

e) At the so called “normal” level,the ordinary one,

the meaning of our life is not hidden but made evident every instant in everything

that happens to us, in all “favorable” and “unfavorable”

events, encounters, etc.

Eliot presents the worst scenario in which most are trapped:

We are the hollow menWe are the stuffed menLeaning togetherHeadpiece filled with straw. Alas!Shape without form, shade without color,Paralyzed force, gesture without motion…

In the unlikely case that the reader is to some extent still a hollow man – this text is meant for everyone – how will you recover your fullness?

The Dalai Lama agrees:

Men lose their health to make money, then lose their money in the attempt to recover their health. They think so much anxiously about the future forgetting to live their present.

Doing so they are unable to live neither the present not the future.

They live as if they should never die and die

as if they had never lived.

The I Ching hexagram HSIAO KUO, the Preponderance of the Small, consists of:

HSIAO, which speaks of small issues, common and apparently unimportant, and of the acquired capacity to be flexible and adjust harmoniously to whatever circumstances one finds himself in, and to the challenges of life.

KUO, which has two meaning: a positive one of going on, going always beyond, and a negative one of possible excess, being at fault, and transgressions of some sorts.

Therefore it presents the essential Alternative,

the choice between light and darkness,

love and fear, life and death.

This hexagram, although it doesn’t say so directly, encourages whoever has drawn it to re-examine his life.

Mere sums it all up thus:

If you have a small consciousness, you will understand only a few things. When your consciousness is very vast, universal, only then will understand the world.

If the consciousness is limited to your little ego,

all the rest will escape you…

there are people whose brain and consciousness are smaller than a walnut…They can understand nothing else except what is in direct contact with their sense.

For them only what they taste, what they see, hear, touch has a reality,

and the rest simply does not exist, and they

accuse us of being fanciful!…

The Veil:

About the Unexamined Life, the Maitrayana Upanishad speaks of the Veil as an “enchantment” which traps most people:

They live according to an unreal idea of the self, deluded, attached,

expressing a falsehood; as if by an enchantment the false

they perceive as the true.

The Dreamgame:

In the Dreamgame, an Unexamined Life is a TRAP, and most of us don’t even know how difficult would be to emerge from it because they have not yet considered their condition sufficiently, or even not at all.

Have you?

To which extent?

That’s all?

As Socrates pointed out,

The unexamined life is not really worth living.

What could possibly be worth?

Indeed the life of most seems utterly meaningless,

but it is really like a cocoon in which our true being

invisibly begins to grow.

The Devil’s Advocate:

The world is like a game played by children and until you have outgrown it, which in most cases we manage to ensure that it never happens, you aren’t yet quite alive, only appear to be.

Do you perchance think that you are fully alive?

Cherish your illusion till they last!

Indeed life is suffering, but I and my client offer this as a consolation: if you follow our advice and become completely dead inwardly, you will have a great advantage on the followers of our opponent: lost in the prison of your days, you will become so dull and insensitive that you will suffer much less, or even not at all!

Yesterday I saw a very good example of meaningless lives: while hitchhiking from Perth to our commune in Belvedere the car who gave me a lift stopped at one of those cheap sea resorts used on weekends by families for picnics.

There were some small cottages, a bit like cheap American motels, and a line of benches between the road and an unspoiled, wonderful sea.

But the benches were all set facing the road, not the sea: those sitting there

were all watching the cars passing by instead

of that wonderful sea!

This is how most people live, facing the road of their unexamined life instead of the ocean, His infinite Love, Light and Bliss,turning their back to it!

Life just happens to them in an apparently random way and they stubbornly resist anything that might uplift lift them from their dismal condition!

Pathetic!

From The Quest:

The most terrible thing we experience in our healing center is that when we try to help someone to wake up a bit instead of rejoicing many feel lost, become fearful and very soon run back to their unexamined lives – we have seen it so many times…it would make the angels cry!

The way I feel when I find myself unable to help someone reminds me of the immense compassion of Feng-Kan:

“Like a rock in the sea sinking, through the Three Worldswandering, poor ephemeral creature in scenes ever lost untila flash of lightning as dust in space life and death shows. “

Life as it is driven or led partly by the impulse of the life-force, partly

by a mind which is mostly a servant and abettor

of the ignorant life-impulse,

but in part also its uneasy and not too luminous or competent guide and mentor;

for a divine life the mind and the life-impulse must cease to be anything but instruments and the inmost psychic being must take their place as

the leader on the path and the indicator of a divine guidance.

Last, life as it is turned towards the satisfaction of the separative ego; ego must disappear and be replaced by the true spiritual person, the central being, and life itself must be turned towards the fulﬁlment of the Divine in terrestrial existence;

there’s not one in a million who knows how to live, and they live like that somehow or other, limping along, managing, not managing; and all that for them, bah!

What is it? Things that happen. They don’t know how to live. All the same one should learn how to live.

That’s the ﬁrst thing one ought to teach children:

to learn how to live.

Contemplate:

1) This passage of Eckhart Tolle:

What you refer to as your “life” should more accurately be called your “life situation.” it is psychological time: past and future. Certain things in the past didn’t go the way you wanted them to go. You are resisting what happened in the past, and now you are resisting what is.

Hope is what keeps you going, but hope keeps you focused on the future,

and this continued focus perpetuates your denial of the Now

and therefore your unhappiness.

Many expressions that are in common usage, and sometimes the structure of language itself, reveal the fact that people don’t know who they are. You say: “He lost his life” or “my life,” as if life were something that you can possess or lose. The truth is:

you don’t ‘have’ a life, you ‘are’ life.

The One Life, the one consciousness that pervades the entire universe and takes temporary form to experience itself as a stone or blade of grass, as an animal, a person, a star or a galaxy.

Can you sense deep within that you already know that?Can you sense that you already are That?

2) This poem of Yeats which speaks of someone

who as a child had a career plan and was successful at it but at each stage of it Plato’s ghost kept asking him “What Then?” and end thus:

The work is done,’ grown old he thought, according to my boyish plan; let the fools rage, I swerved in naught, something to perfection brought’;

But louder sang that ghost,

“What then?”

What then?

3) These words of Mère:

Men have a feeling that if they are not all the time running about and bursting

into fits of feverish activity, they are doing nothing. It is an illusion

to think that all these so-called movements change things.

It is merely taking a cup and beating the water in it; the water is moved about, but it is not changed for all your beating.

This illusion of action is one of the greatest

illusions of human nature.

It hurts progress because it brings on you the necessity of rushing always into some excited movement.

To turn towards Thee, unite with Thee, live in Thee and for Thee,

is supreme happiness, unmixed joy, immutable peace;

it is to breathe Inﬁnity, to soar in eternity, no longer feel one’s limits,

escape from time and space.

Why do men flee from these boons as though they feared them?

What a strange thing is ignorance, that source

of all suffering!

How miserable that obscurity which keeps men away from the very thing which would bring them happiness and subjects them to this painful school of ordinary existence fashioned entirely from struggle and suffering!